old and new, page-22

“A ‘discoverer’ is someone who sees what everyone else sees but thinks what no¬ one else has thought before”. Quote: Sir Harrold Raggatt

It is worth summarising the story of WMC’s discovery of Kambalda by renowned geologist Roy Woodall to demonstrate the truth in these words.
From an interviewed by Professor Richard Stanton in 2008 – “Interviews with Australian Scientists” Series

The story started with a farmer named George Cowcill who as a prospector had picked up some samples from around the old Butterfly goldmine “which had ‘no bloody gold’ in.
“ In the early 1960s he came back to the goldfields with a partner, John Morgan. They went back to these ‘diggings’ south of Kalgoorlie and collected some more samples of the ironstone rock. John Morgan was asked to take the samples in to Western Mining to see if they were interested in this material which had been said to contain small quantities of nickel.”

“There could be no doubt that this ironstone outcrop, which I had seen now by visiting the location, was coming from an iron-nickel-copper-sulphide vein that had precipitated out of classic mafic or ultramafic rocks. Therefore, despite the wisdom of the day that you had to be in Proterozoic rocks to find nickel sulphides, here in Archaean rocks there was proof beyond doubt that magmatic rocks had been intruded and with them had come potentially economic grades of nickel and nickel-copper sulphides.”

"I went back to the company executives and said, ‘Look, I’ve always believed that this country of Kalgoorlie and the Western Australian goldfields, when you compare the rocks with those in Canada, should have metals other than gold in economic quantities – maybe copper, lead or zinc and maybe nickel.’

‘I showed the outcrop to some renowned geologists from major companies, but they were not impressed. They did not think it was worthwhile providing any finance to earn an equity, even a big equity, in this occurrence. So I went back to Western Mining’s head office in Melbourne and said, ‘Please, Sir, may I drill some of these ironstone outcrops?’ There was great scepticism: ‘How is it that this area has been prospected for 70 years by mining companies and prospectors and they’ve only found gold, yet you come along and say that there are also potentially economic nickel sulphide ores? Moreover, no¬ one else has ever found nickel ores in Archaean rocks!’

WMC eventually “approved a small budget of £22,000, sufficient to allow me to drill six short diamond drill holes.”

"So, in January 1966, a man who had been drilling for me on other prospects for some time, Jack Lunnon – a rough gentleman – rigged up his diamond drill close to the discovery gossan which I had initially sampled, and drilled down-dip from the occurrence to see what this ironstone would be like below the weathered zone. We intersected nickel sulphides, I think nine feet wide – we measured in feet in those days – which assayed 8.3% nickel."

"Then I had to learn a lesson that I guess anyone who’s involved with scientific research has to learn, that you may be at the point of a discovery, only to get setbacks. When the second hole was drilled, where we also thought ironstone would pass into nickel sulphides below the weathered zone, we found nothing. In the third hole we found nothing. In the fourth hole we found nothing. In the fifth and sixth holes we found nothing. Remember, nobody stopped us doing this drilling, even though there was great scepticism. Eventually we worked out the trend of the nickel sulphide ore. Jack Lunnon then put a whole series of successful drill holes into the orebody. Almost weekly he would come back with a drill core of very high grade nickel ore."

"Anyway – well, it’s all history now – it started the great West Australian nickel boom. Kambalda became the discovery site of the first nickel sulphides ever found in the world in Archaean rocks. The sulphides were associated with a very strange ultramafic rock which we now know was a very high-temperature ultramafic lava called a komatiite, and ‘komatiite’ became the word to use if looking for nickel."

"So we made history, and we made Western Mining a great company. It suddenly became the glamour stock on the Stock Exchange."